beginning breeding research

Although I am incerdibly new to snakes and BPs in particular I am looking ahead to breeding a couple years from now. I love to research and learn about all these different types. I have tried reading the forums on morphs and honestly they are baffling to me at this point.

I Have read in a thread here that you should get the female first? I have a male normal - is this BP useless for breeding - is there special "breeding" type of BP?

What would you recommend to start learning about how to preapre in advance for the goal of breeding.

I would like to buy another BP very soon as I am really enjoying working with my current. I thought about buying some kind of morph female. Anyways, would love input -always aiming to grow in knowledge on this.

Many thanks.

Phillip

Genetics research is amazingly interesting Phillip. I love reading up on all of it and there's a ton of good sites online. I'd suggest places like NERD (New England Reptile Distributors), Markus Jayne just to name too. Get a handle on what a punnet square is and what all the terms like recessive and co-dominant and things like homozygous and hetrozygous and many more. That really helped me when I first started looking at this stuff.

We're still very new to all this as well and both my husband and I find this genetics stuff very interesting and love to watch all the major breeders sites for new snakes they are producing from various breedings.

~~Jo~~

There's nothing wrong with breeding normals. Your male would be fine to breed. If you get a morph female you can produce hets if it's a recessive morph, and actual morphs if it's a dominant or co-dominant gene.

The reason people say get a female first is because they take longer to mature.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shelby

If you get a morph female you can produce hets if it's a recessive morph, and actual morphs if it's a dominant or co-dominant gene.

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Oops, that means that I just gave incorrect info in another thread. Hets to normals produce hets? I thought it was just hets to hets that produced hets and homo and normals.

I'm so confused! lol

From my miniscule learning so far I undersood HETxNORM = 50%HET/50%NORM. All will look normal but half will be HET and half will be NORM.

And NORM/HOMO = 100% HETS normal looking.

Don't quote me I am still learning :)



PWE

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Phillip

Don't quote me I am still learning :)

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Me too! :) I think I mis-spoke. I'll save the advice/genetics to the pros. :)

You need to know if the trait is recessive, co-dominant or dominat before you start. Each type of trait will result in a diferrent result. Then you need to know if you have a homo for the morph, a het or a normal. Once you have that information you can do the theoretical chance of what you'll get.

Hets to normals CAN produce hets. Around 50% will be hets.. since the het parent will pass the gene along 50% of the time.

Het to het can produce a homozygous baby (ie a visible morph) since one out of four times both parents will pass their mutated gene.